GUI front-ends

Using Panorama Tools without a graphical helper application is very difficult. There are a number of GUI front-ends to make the process easier.

The following lists are in approximate order of creation (please re-arrange if inaccurate).

Basic control point pickers

• Panorama Tools Plugins still contain the original control-point selection process, this involved pasting little barcodes into source images and was extremely laborious (Open Source, Windows, Linux, Mac).

• PTPicker is a java application for creating control-points that superceded the bar code method (Freeware, Windows, Linux, Mac).

• ControlPoints is a control-point selection tool (Freeware, Windows only).

• PanoPoints is a control-point picker written in Perl (Open Source, Linux).

Full workflow management (including control point picking)

• PTGui is an all purpose tool for managing the various Panorama Tools, autopano and enblend (Shareware, Windows and Mac OS X (Universal Binary)).

• PTMac is another sophisticated GUI for Panorama Tools and enblend (Shareware, Mac Classic and OS X).

• PTAssembler is yet another sophisticated GUI for Panorama Tools, autopano and enblend (Shareware, Windows only).

• PTOpenGUI is no longer maintained and is now superceded by Hugin (Open Source, Windows only).

• Hugin is another sophisticated GUI for Panorama Tools, nona, autopano, autopano-sift, and enblend (Open Source, Linux, UNIX, OS X and Windows).

• PanoWizard is another GUI for Panorama Tools, autopano, SmartBlend and enblend (Freeware, Windows only).

Other specialist GUIs

• Enblend Front End is a wrapper around enblend and SmartBlend (Freeware, Windows only).

• PanoCube is a wrapper around Panorama Tools for converting equirectangular images to QTVR format (Shareware, Windows and Linux).

• Pano2QTVR is a new and very promising Windows shareware project to convert equirectangular (360°x180°) panos to QuickTime and Flash cubic movies and link them together to virtual tours. Includes Hotspot Editor, sound sprites and object movies.